Question 1

What is consent mode, and what happens without consent?

Accepted Answer

A mechanism by which analytics and advertising tags **adjust their behaviour according to whether a user has consented** — sending limited, non-identifying signals rather than either full tracking or nothing at all.

**The problem.** Privacy regulation requires consent before setting non-essential cookies or processing personal data for advertising. A user who declines should not be tracked. But if tags simply fire nothing, the organisation loses all visibility of a substantial proportion of traffic, and reported conversions collapse.

**How consent mode works.** Tags load but check the consent state first, then behave differently:

**With consent** — full measurement, cookies set, identifiers used.

**Without consent** — no identifiers or cookies, but **cookieless pings** may be sent containing no personal data: that an event occurred, the timestamp, coarse information about page and device.

**Modelling** then estimates the unobserved conversions by using the relationship between observed behaviour among consenting users and the aggregate signals from non-consenting ones.

**Advanced versus basic implementation.** In **basic**, tags do not load at all until consent is given, so nothing is sent. In **advanced**, tags load and send the limited signals, enabling modelling. The distinction matters considerably for data quality and is a genuine decision rather than a technical detail.

**What this means for your numbers:**

**A portion of reported conversions are modelled estimates**, not observed events. They are labelled as such in some interfaces and not obviously in others, and treating modelled figures as measurements is a real risk.

**Modelling requires sufficient volume** to be reliable, so smaller sites get poorer estimates or none.

**Comparisons across periods** spanning an implementation change are not valid.

**The requirements that make consent valid** under GDPR: freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous, by clear affirmative action. **Pre-ticked boxes, implied consent from continued browsing, and making rejection harder than acceptance are not valid** — and regulators have acted against cookie banners on exactly these grounds.

**Rejecting must be as easy as accepting**, which is why banners increasingly show both buttons at the same level.

Question 2

What is the difference between a cookie, a tracking pixel and server-side tagging?

Accepted Answer

They are three different mechanisms for the same job — recognising visitors and recording what they did — operating at different layers. A cookie is a small file a website stores in your browser.

Question 3

How do ad blockers affect marketing measurement?

Accepted Answer

They remove a non-random slice of your audience from the data, which distorts more than the raw blocking rate suggests — and the browsers themselves now do much of the blocking, independently of

Question 4

What is marketing mix modelling and why is it coming back?

Accepted Answer

Marketing mix modelling (MMM) is a statistical technique estimating how different marketing activities contribute to sales, using aggregate historical data rather than tracking individuals. How it

Question 5

What is the difference between first-party, second-party, third-party and zero-party data?

Accepted Answer

Who collected it and from whom — a distinction that became central as third-party tracking was restricted. First-party data. Collected by you, directly from your own customers and visitors, through

Question 6

What rules actually govern advertising, and what does the ASA do?

Accepted Answer

Advertising in the UK sits under a co-regulatory system: industry-written codes enforced by a self-regulatory body, backed by statutory regulators who can act where self-regulation fails.

Question 7

What is dark social and why does so much traffic show as direct?

Accepted Answer

Dark social is sharing that happens through private channels — messaging apps, email, SMS — where no referrer information is passed. The traffic is real and its source is invisible, so analytics

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